I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.